Thanks, Netflix… I Guess…

I saw on twitter last night, and awoke this morning to find an email from Netflix offering compensation for the outage subscribers experienced the other night. I was a bit frustrated when I couldn’t stream my queue, but quickly turned to Airplay and watched video I owned instead of subscribed to.

Here was the email:

Yes that’s right, Netflix has offered a generous 3% of what their streaming only service costs per month. For you math whizs out there, that’s $0.24. Twenty-four cents.

I’m not really sure what the motive here is. I don’t need a quarter back. Is this intended to show me how little I pay for the service? Is it a well intentioned gesture of apology and good will?

If I assume that they gave this to every subscriber, which is a big assumption, that means they spent about $5 million.

The big question is why did the interruption happen? What failed? The email is silent on that, and there have been no explanations. I wonder if the $5 million wouldn’t have been better spent on what ever the issue was.

Giving me a quarter doesn’t impress me. A simple apology would have been just as effective. I’ll take the money, but I would rather know that they are improving on whatever broke.